US smartphone owners want Apple and Google to provide their NFC wallets

A survey of more than 1,000 US smartphone owners has found that Apple and Google top the list of the companies most trusted to provide them with a mobile wallet.

“Smartphone owners in this study tended to reflect their phone OS when picking their preference for a mobile wallet provider,” say the authors of the NFC Pulse Study, conducted by consumer electronics review and shopping site Retrevo.

The study found that iPhone owners would be more comfortable using a mobile wallet from Apple to a much greater extent (61%) than Android owners (46%) would like to use a Google wallet. Surprisingly, say the researchers, “the providers who are most closely associated with credit cards and cell phones, namely MasterCard, Visa, AT&T, and Verizon, came in below companies like Apple and Microsoft.”

NFC PULSE: Which companies would you trust to provide a mobile wallet? Click to enlarge.

“Even for the mobile wallet optimists the NFC glass is only about a quarter full,” the researchers continue. “Only around 21% of consumers said they would like to buy things with a mobile wallet and are waiting for that capability to be in their next cell phone. The overwhelming majority (79%) of consumers in this study are either not interested in mobile wallets or don’t know what a mobile wallet is.

“It also looks like interest in mobile wallets divides along generational lines with 28% of 18- to 35-year-olds expressing much stronger interest in NFC than the large majority (75%) of the 50 and older set, who don’t want anything to do with it. Men appear to be more interested in buying things (27%) with their phones as women (15%) with nearly twice as many men as women indicating they would like to be able to buy things with their cell phones.”